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Preparing Documents

Here are some small hints and tips for formatting/preparing your documents correctly, which will save you time and energy otherwise expended on laborious cut and paste exercises.

Microsoft® Word Formatting

In order to parse documents, Document Loader uses  the hierarchical Word document structure. That is, it will assume that a Heading 1 is of higher importance than a Heading 2. It is important to remember that the document structure is more complex than just making a title by ‘increasing the font size’. Switching views to ‘Outline’ can help you understand how Word see the document. This will assist in preparing your documents for Document Loader to parse.

• Document Loader expects each requirement to be in a single paragraph and formatted with an appropriate heading style to indicate its level in the hierarchy.

  

• Requirement text, figures and other information should be positioned directly beneath the heading and formatted using paragraph style Normal or other body text-level style.

• Use separate paragraphs for distinct pieces of information, e.g. Assumption text and Requirement text.

• Always use paragraph styles rather than text formatting to change the appearance of a paragraph.

• Heading styles apply an outline level to your paragraphs, which tell Document Loader about the level of each requirement in the hierarchy

• Document Loader prefers pictures and OLE objects to be inserted in line with text. This means the picture is positioned in the text layer of the document, rather than floating on top of the text. In line pictures produce a better document structure.

• If you use captions to describe the pictures in your document, make sure that the caption is positioned immediately before or immediately after the picture, and formatted with Word’s caption style.

• If your document contains diagrams built with Word’s drawing objects, then you must ensure that all shapes in the diagram are grouped, otherwise Document Loader will parse each shape as a separate image.

• If you plan to capture a table with a requirement in each row, then your table must be uniform, that is, no merged cells and have the same number of columns in each row.

• As with pictures, if you use captions to describe the tables in your document, make sure that the caption is positioned immediately before or immediately after the table, and formatted with Word’s caption style.

  

For more information on formatting your documents correctly please refer to our online help.

Sick of having to start from scratch when working with large documents in Document Loader? Want to save your current progress and return at a later date?

You can use a session to save a snapshot of Document Loader, so you can return to the same point at a later time. Sessions are useful when working with large documents or if you need to shutdown your PC for any reason.

What is a Session?

Sessions store information about the state of Document Loader at a given point, such as:

• A copy of the current document
• A copy of the current capture setup definition
• Which parts of the document have already been captured
• The state of the Document Explorer tree nodes
• Any mappings, e.g. table mappings
• Any changes made in the Options dialog

How can I save a Session?

You can only save a session when working with a new document; not a new version of a document. You can save a session at any time, so long as you have a document open.

To save a session you can either:

• Press the Save Session button button from the Toolbar
• Select Save Session from the File pulldown menu
• Press Ctrl + S
  (The Status Bar shows the progress of the Save operation)

How can I load/restore a Session?

• To load a saved session you can either:
• Select Load Session from the File pulldown menu
• Press Ctrl + L
  If you attempt to load a session with a document open you will be prompted to close the current document. The Load Session dialog will be displayed as shown below:

Simply identify the session you wish to load and select it in the list. You can sort on any column by clicking on its column heading; click once for ascending order and again for descending order.
Click the OK button to load the selected session.

How can I delete a Session?

To delete a session you need to open the Load Session dialog by either:

• Selecting Load Session from the File pulldown menu
• Pressing Ctrl+L
  Select the appropriate session and press the Delete button. Select Yes to confirm the deletion and Cancel to remove the Load Session dialog.